David Haddock

Senior Fellow Emeritus

David D. Haddock has a long standing interest in the economics and laws of the American West. Raised on a ranch in western Oklahoma — the “Indian Territory” of the nineteenth century — and being one-sixteenth Cherokee, Haddock has been particularly drawn to Indian issues in his professional career. His first article in that area concerned tribal taxation of mineral extraction He subsequently began to apply property rights economics to the chronic poverty of tribal reservations. For many years, Haddock has taught federal Indian law at Northwestern University from an economic perspective that remains virtually unknown at other law schools.

“Mainstream Indian law scholarship is almost devoid of economic interest or understanding. The application of good economic reasoning could improve indigenous affairs from nearly everyone’s perspective — except the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” he says. Haddock’s research on the law and economics of indigenous people has taken him beyond the United States. He has traveled and studied in Ecuador, and is pursuing research on the Aborigines in Australia and the Maori in New Zealand.

Haddock’s work has appeared in scholarly journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law Economics and Organization, and Economic Inquiry as well as in law reviews and several books discussing water, environmental, and Indian issues. His chapter in Water Marketing-The Next Generation contrasts cumbersome centralized water regulation with the benefits of efficient, decentralized regulation. Haddock is now researching fallacies in application of externality theory as a motivation for government regulation, and on state taxes that affect Indian tribes directly or indirectly.

From 1968 to 1970, Haddock was a Peace Corpsman in Ethiopia, eventually returning to receive a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He now teaches both law and economics at Northwestern University. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the International Center for Economic Research in Torino, Italy, and has lectured widely in both the U.S. and Europe.

Haddock lives in Evanston, Ill., with his wife and daughter. His interests include reading, jogging, traveling, and listening to a variety of music from opera and Indian flutes to classic rock and old Dylan.

Articles by David Haddock

PERC begins a colloquium this week on property rights and liberty in Native American societies. The program focuses on the historical emergence of property rights and how these rights have impacted Native Americans.